What is podcasting?

A podcast is a digital audio file, mostly Mp3 but other formats such as AAC are also common, which are made available for download on the internet. The word podcast derives from the words "broadcast" and "pod" because after the success of the well-known iPod, audio podcasts were usually listened on these portable devices. Podcasting, for example, is similar yet somewhat different to webcasting, in other words Internet streaming, which unlike podcasting, is not usually designed for offline listening content.

Now lets get into context and give some historical background about podcasts. The term "podcasting" was first mentioned by Ben Hammersley in The Guardian newspaper in 2004. He used this term for this medium that was usually reproduced in iPods, as mentioned before. However podcasts existed before the introduction of the iPod or even the famous iTunes.

The thing that really makes podcasts different from just downloading a music file and listening to it, is that podcasting is all about having the files come to you through syndication instead of having to search files through the internet search. The benefits of podcasting is that you subscribe to podcasts just as you would subscribe to this blog for example. What this does is that you even have the option of making your reader download new podcasts whenever new are available, and then transfer these files to your portable device for example. The case would be for example now with iCloud, in which you can download a podcast from iTunes to your computer for example, and have it instantly in your iPhone, iPod or iPad.

Podcasts are now somewhat competing with radios. What more and more people are doing is recording talk-back shows from home and distributing this to people all over the world, with audiences reaching the thousands, and maybe in the future, the millions. This is why podcasting is a revolutionary technology that leads, with blogs, to a new content distribution revolution on the web, that will be even greater in the future.

Finally, although podcasts are usually referred as to audio files, there are also video podcasts, called "vodcasts."These type of podcasts have the same function as the mentioned audio podcasts, but instead consist of usually short clips of video that are shared on the internet. Vodcasts are now very common for example on the Web Tv. Other types of podcasting include enhanced podcasts or podcast novels.

Here is a link to a podcast I did several years ago:

PODCAST